Beyond GDP: Measuring What Counts for Economic and Social Performance

by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Martine Durand

Metrics matter for policy and policy matters for well-being. In this report, the co-chairs of the OECD-hosted High Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Jean-Paul Fitoussi and Martine Durand, show how over-reliance on GDP as the yardstick of economic performance misled policy makers who did not see the 2008 crisis coming. When the crisis did hit, concentrating on the wrong indicators meant that governments made inadequate policy choices, with severe and long-lasting consequences for many people. While GDP is the most well-known, and most powerful economic indicator, it can’t tell us everything we need to know about the health of countries and societies. In fact, it can’t even tell us everything we need to know about economic performance. We need to develop dashboards of indicators that reveal who is benefitting from growth, whether that growth is environmentally sustainable, how people feel about their lives, what factors contribute to an individual’s or a country’s success. This book looks at progress made over the past 10 years in collecting well-being data, and in using them to inform policies. An accompanying volume, For Good Measure: Advancing Research on Well-being Metrics Beyond GDP, presents the latest findings from leading economists and statisticians on selected issues within the broader agenda on defining and measuring well-being.

Genres: Economics

143 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 27, 2018

About the author

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, ForMemRS, FBA, is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is also the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists") and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. Since 2001, he has been a member of the Columbia faculty, and has held the rank of University Professor since 2003. He also chairs the University of Manchester's Brooks World Poverty Institute and is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Professor Stiglitz is also an honorary professor at Tsinghua University School of Public Policy and Management. Stiglitz is one of the most frequently cited economists in the world.

Reviews

[David Steven Jacoby]

A good summary of a complex and dynamic field

There is a lot of fragmented effort around measuring well-being, and this book distills and summarizes the situation. Good for an overview.

[Fellipe]

I personally find indexes fascinating. Capturing an array of factors and facts into a single mathematical unit, using some complex and not-so-complex mathematical methodology, is something quite astonishing to me. And now I just noticed how this all began back in my childhood, when my Geography teacher explained to us HDI's concept and how it's not an end-all, be-all measure to welfare (in much simpler terms to a bunch of 8-9-years-olds).

This book is an extension of such an idea. Indexes won't change the world by itself, but in their current state they are more often than not, NOT proper measures of general well-being. Given the amount of data we can generate in today's times, it is just crazy that we haven't been able to generate at the same rate better measures as proposed by Stiglitz and all the other authors involved in this study.

Personally, I'm trying to work to address this issue. And I hope other economists can join the cause as well.

[Natasha Hurley-Walker]

Too dry for me!